Trust lies at the center of the relationship among grocers, food and beverage manufacturers and shoppers. More than half a decade of upheaval – from inflation and pandemic-driven shifts to online shopping and price-fixing scandals involving major commodities – has put that trust to the test.
That became clear in late September, when Walmart President and CEO John Furner penned a letter to the retail giant’s customers promising that the company was not using its technology to overcharge them with its rapidly growing fleet of electronic shelf labels (ESL).
It was a surprising move for a company that has spent the last decade investing heavily in tech as a challenge to its biggest competitor, Amazon. Walmart’s announcement follows a wave of state laws and city ordinances restricting the use of personal data to set grocery prices.
Maryland’s law took effect Oct. 1, but it is not the most recently enacted measure: New Jersey enacted a related law in July, and Seattle’s mayor signed a grocery-pricing ordinance Oct. 5. The important distinction is that most of these measures target personalized “surveillance pricing,” rather than banning all price changes driven by demand, inventory or time of day.
It’s not just states that are giving a skeptical side-eye to the industry. Grocers are also taking heat from the Trump Administration, which launched an investigation into high grocery prices last December, noting at the time that, “in recent years, major players in America’s food supply chain have paid tens of millions to settle price-fixing lawsuits.”
Trump talked big in his Executive Order 14364, noting that some sectors of the food supply, “including meat processing, seed, fertilizer, and equipment” are vulnerable to price-fixing. But when it came time to punish companies, particularly in the egg industry, that settled on antitrust cases brought by the US Department of Justice, the DOJ gave what critics called a slap on the wrist.
Furner wrote in his letter that Walmart doesn’t “set different prices based on who you are or the time of day, and we won’t.” Irrespective of the customer’s “income, shopping history, urgency or what we think you could pay” will never have an impact on the price, Furner promised.
In the era of artificial intelligence, where retailers’ use of information remains hidden from consumers, it might come as no surprise that they would question the integrity of grocery executives, but Furner addressed the issue as well.
“We want to offer that same level of personalized care when our customers shop online with Sparky, our AI shopping assistant. When you engage with Sparky, that’s an invitation to serve you better, not to use your personal information to set a personalized price,” he explained.
What did Walmart do to require such a public declaration? In a word, nothing. Much of the criticism on electronic shelf labels is being spread by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), which represents 1.2 million workers, more than 800,000 of whom are grocery workers.
In March, UFCW condemned Walmart’s rollout of ESL, also referred to as digital price tags, basing much of its argument on a study released by the Federal Trade Commission on Jan. 20, 2025, just three days before Trump’s inauguration. The FTC report, however, never makes a single statement or appears to have ever studied digital price tags.
Rather, the investigation into “surveillance pricing” aimed “to better understand the shadowy market that third-party intermediaries use to set individualized prices for products and services based on consumers’ characteristics and behaviors, like location, demographics, browsing patterns and shopping history,” according to the FTC.
It did reveal that online shopping could be an opportunity for retailers to engage in dynamic pricing. The report noted: “Staff found that consumer behaviors ranging from mouse movements on a webpage to the type of products that consumers leave unpurchased in an online shopping cart can be tracked and used by retailers to tailor consumer pricing.”
Tucked away at the tail end of the UFCW statement appears to be the primary motivation for its opposition to the ESLs: jobs. The union noted the threat these systems pose to skilled grocery clerks. “UFCW members are essential to keeping our communities fed, and they know how disruptive ESLs could be for workers and shoppers alike,” the union said.
The absence of a smoking gun doesn’t mean grocery giants and affiliated companies are off the hook. In December 2025, Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative published an investigative report showing that Instacart had used artificial intelligence by Eversight to charge customers different prices.
“The investigation found that Instacart’s algorithmic pricing experiments could result in price differences as high as 23% for certain products and could cost families more than $1,200 a year at checkout,” Consumer Reports said in August.
Instacart quickly ended the practice of charging customers different prices for the same products.
Consumer Reports’ comment in August was in response to an announcement by FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson that the commission sought public comment on an enforcement statement it will use to enforce deceptive use of personalized pricing. FTC said that while personalized pricing is not prohibited in all circumstances – rideshare at different times of the day and in certain situations, for instance – deceptive pricing violates Section 5 of the FTC Act.
“When consumers see a listed price, they expect it to be the same price that everyone else sees, not the retailer’s estimate of how much they are willing to pay based on their personal data,” Ferguson said in August.
What does this all mean for retailers and CPG? It’s clear that it comes back to that central tenet of trust. Perception is reality in the world of grocery, and if consumers believe those tiny electronic price tags are collecting their data and jacking up prices, then that’s the reality retailers must address, whether real or fabricated.
Walmart made the right decision by addressing shoppers’ concerns directly through its CEO, rather than leaving the response to a company spokesperson. Furner’s commitment puts the retail giant’s credibility on the line if it adopts surveillance pricing – and sets a standard shoppers, as well as food and beverage manufacturers, can demand from the rest of the industry.
